In this book, you’ll learn why Ridley says exchange is the root cause of prosperity and gain a clear understanding of economics and the evolutionary history of mankind. From the Stone Age to the Information Age, from hundreds of thousands of years ago to the 21st century.
To back up his argument, Ridley collected and analyzed a vast collection of historical materials covering the entire history of mankind. The book we’re unlocking today is filled with Ridley’s evidence of the points mentioned earlier. Is exchange really so magical? It’s often said that any conclusion should be supported by factual evidence. In the end, exchange, specialization, and the innovation that emerged from them allowed the human species to create a prosperous world in just a few hundred thousand years. The emergence of specialization, in turn, promoted technological innovation, made specialization more efficient and convenient, and resulted in further exchange. Through exchange, humans discovered the advantages they gained through the division of labor. So how did the world become so prosperous? The answer is through exchange, says the author of today’s book, the popular science writer Matt Ridley. We live in a period of prosperity, comfort, and convenience that is unprecedented in human history. Virtually every human need and desire has been satisfied in this age. If we open WhatsApp or Facebook, we can see posts and interact with people from around the world. There are various restaurants on the streets whenever we want to eat.
#Rational optimism book full
Supermarkets are full of goods from all over the world. Wherever we go, there are convenient means of transport to choose from. Speaking of prosperity, we all more or less experience prosperity, since we live in the Information Age. This book answers the question: “How did the world become so prosperous?”
Today we’ll unlock The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.
Deutsch presents science as a force for betterment, since it impels us to explain the world while forcing us to acknowledge our fallibility.īut the best paean to optimism in the English language is in PG Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves. And a deep theory of why humanity is destined to make progress may be found in David Deutsch’s dazzling The Beginning of Infinity. Still bigger pictures are presented in Johan Norberg’s Progress and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. The story is told in James Payne’s The Decline of Force, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code, and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc – an allusion to Theodore Parker’s famous line (beloved of Martin Luther King) that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. It is also decimating child labour, capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality. Progress is not just material but moral: the world has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, heretic-burning, witch hunts, duelling, apartheid and male-only suffrage. Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to Brand’s groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog, which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking “Earthrise” photograph on the cover. The equally remarkable decline of armed conflict is recounted in Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War and several irreverent books by John Mueller, including The Remnants of War and the sarcastically titled collection A Dangerous World? The most surprising may be The Internationalists, in which Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the oft-ridiculed 1928 pact outlawing war deserves much of the credit.Īnd no, the environment is not hopelessly despoiled and depauperate, say “ecomodernists” such as Ronald Bailey in The End of Doom, Ruth DeFries in The Big Ratchet Chris Thomas in Inheritors of the Earth, and Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline. As does Factfulness by the late TED star Hans Rosling, who liked to quiz his audiences on trends in wellbeing and show that they did worse than chimpanzees. More modestly, Charles Kenny tells us how the world is Getting Better. Authors who describe the remarkable decline of poverty, hunger and disease in the developing world anticipate such incredulity that they often flaunt the word “great” in their titles, such as Nobel laureate Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Steven Radelet’s The Great Surge.
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